
Maternal asthma may be partially responsible for miscarriage and infertility, according to the abstract, “Asthma and Reproductive Outcomes: A Danish Nationwide Cohort Study,” presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress in Vienna, Austria.
Despite the results of this large study, researchers noted that having asthma does not affect the number of live births women can go on to have.
“Asthma is common in women of reproductive age. Previous studies have shown that it takes women with asthma longer to get pregnant than those without asthma when undergoing fertility treatment, and that asthmatic women who succeed in getting pregnant have more often had fertility treatment than non-asthmatic women,” said Anne Vejen Hansen, MD, a pulmonologist from the department of respiratory medicine at Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark. “But most existing studies are on women who have actually got pregnant, so we wanted to examine fertility outcomes on a national scale, to also include those that might not become pregnant at all.”
Researchers studied reproductive outcomes for 769,880 Danish women born between 1976 and 1999, following them from 1994 to 2017. Women who took anti-asthma medication on a regular basis were classified as asthmatic. According to the results, women with asthma experienced a higher degree of fetal loss compared to women without asthma (17.0% versus 15.7%) and required fertility treatments more often (5.6% vs. 5.0%). However, the proportion who subsequently gave birth was 77% in women with and without asthma, suggesting that asthma does not seem to affect the number of live births.
“We found that women fulfilling the definition of asthma had a higher rate of fetal loss and an increased use of fertility treatment,” Dr. Hansen said. “The more severe the asthma and the more flare ups the women experienced, the more likely they were to need fertility treatment. Why this is, is not clear. It might be related to systemic inflammation throughout the body, including women’s reproductive organs.”
Researchers said the results of the study underscore the importance of managing asthma in reproductive-aged women. They also plan to investigate the possible effect of male asthma on fertility.